The recent thread Kroc started about what OSNews should focus on missed an important bit, something that was not mentioned.

If you want OSNews to focus on subject x, submit news on subject x.

It's impossible for us to keep track of everything, and even the subjects that we do track have a severe lack of news. Try and visit the sites of the usual alternative operating systems we report on, and you'll see that many of them have like 1 news item per month, usually even less. If people want us to report more on alternative, small operating system projects than surely, I agree - the problem is, we can't fill OSNews with just that.

There are a lot of alternative projects out there, so go ahead, submit news about them. Make sure you have proper links, and preferably: multiple paragraphs with background info or some history. Strip the marketing blabber.

In the end, OSNews can be heavily influenced by what its readers submit.

By the way, is there any real / official criteria for the news actually chosen? Like that some big boss at the big OSnews office building makes a daily ceremony and throws dice in order to choose which of the many submitted news gets published and which will not?

For example, sometimes very light news, like lighthearted humor stories only, or stories unrelated to IT get published here, while there could be also important IT news published. (Anyway, I like humor too.)

I've submitted quite many news during the years (but lately been usually all too busy to do that). However, when, for example, I've sometimes submitted many news on the same day, in the hopes that maybe some of those could be published, I've sometimes ended wondering why maybe the least interesting and least serious of those news (at least from my point of view) got published while the others did not.

These are, of course, very subjective matters, and I'm not making any big issue of this.

I can also understand, that if I've submitted, say, four news stories some day, it makes sense that only one or two news submissions from me get chosen, and that the rest of the day's news are from someone's else news submissions. Suits me just fine.

So just a general kind of question about news criteria I thought to mention as part of this conversation thread now.